Trypimeni is a Greek community in the occupied district of Ammochostos (Famagusta). It lies 35 kilometres north-west of Ammochostos, at an altitude of 230 metres, on a hill in the southern foothills of the Pentadaktylos, overlooking the Mesaoria. Its land rose to the crest of the range, at Zygovounos, and included part of the Mavron Oros state forests.¹ At the 1960 census it had 456 inhabitants, all Greeks.

Name

The 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas already writes the village “Trypimeni”, and the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron “Tripimeni”.² The official Gazetteer of Cyprus records it under the same name.³

Founding and first records

According to a village tradition recorded by the 2019 government publication on the displaced municipalities and communities, the first inhabitants were three shepherds. According to the same publication, the villagers believed that the village began at the site of Agios Athanasios, among the orchards, where there are ruins and many stones from an old settlement.⁴ The British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, noted that Trypimeni is an old settlement.⁵

Frankish rule, Venetian rule

Trypimeni lay on one of the roads that led from the Mesaoria over the Pentadaktylos to Keryneia. This is why it is mentioned in the war of 1373–74 with the Genoese. According to Machairas and Bustron, when the Cypriot troops of the constable, the commander-in-chief of the kingdom, struck a Genoese supply convoy at Sinta, they brought the booty to Trypimeni. There they unloaded it from the carts, loaded it onto camels and other beasts, and from Trypimeni took it safely to Keryneia.⁶

According to the British archaeologist David Hogarth, Trypimeni belonged, together with Knodara and other villages of the Kythrea area, to the fief of the counts of the Karpasia, which under Venetian rule was held by the Venetian Giustiniani, until they lost it with the Turkish conquest of 1570.⁷

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Trypimeni is a mixed village, with 30 property-holding households and a church. Unlike the villages of the plain, it had mainly trees and small holdings: more than 160 olive trees, most of them mountain olives, carobs, small vineyards, gardens with mulberries and other fruit trees, shares of running water and an olive press. There were few animals: just under 80 sheep, a few cows and oxen and one mule.⁸

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of Trypimeni is dedicated to Panagia Eleousa. It stands in the southern part of the old settlement and was rebuilt in the early 20th century, on the site of an older church.⁹

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew cereals, fodder crops, olives and carobs, and stock-raising was fairly well developed.¹⁰ According to the 2019 publication, they gathered olives and carobs and grew oranges, which they watered from a large reservoir in the orchards; the village had four coffee shops, and two buses linked it with the towns.¹¹ The Trypimeni Cooperative Credit Society “Proodos” was founded in 1926.

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1878 children from Trypimeni went to a school at the monastery of Melandryna, north of the village. The first community school of “common letters” opened in 1869–70 in a house in the village and later in other houses rented by the community. The first teacher was Christos from Mazotos, followed by Kleanthis Dimitri from Nicosia. Each pupil paid a few piastres a month, and the whole village fed the teacher in turn.¹² In the school year 1973–74 the Greek primary school of Trypimeni had 31 pupils and two teachers.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Trypimeni had 254 inhabitants in 1881, 285 in 1891, 352 in 1901, 430 in 1911 and 476 in 1921.¹³ In 1931 it had 433 inhabitants, all Christians, and in 1946 515, all Orthodox (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 456 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 339 Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 307 inhabitants of Trypimeni signed, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters records 40 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Trypimeni 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 17 people from Flamoudi, Trypimeni and Koutsoventis were taken to Gypsou, where, as the Commission found established, the Turkish forces held Greek civilians in confinement.¹⁴ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

Four inhabitants of Trypimeni, all civilians, were recorded as missing. All four disappeared in the village itself, and their remains have not been located to this day. One dead of 1974 is also recorded in the village, a civilian.

According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Panagia Eleousa into a mosque, and used it as such until a new mosque was built in the village, around 2017. At the end of 2021 the church was repaired on the outside, but by 2024 it had begun to deteriorate again.¹⁵ The 2009 list records it as looted and desecrated.