Vasileia, together with the seaside settlement of Vavylas, is a large, mainly Greek community of the occupied district of Keryneia. The village lies 19 kilometres west of Keryneia, at an altitude of 40 metres, at the northern foot of the Pentadaktylos, and Vavylas 2 kilometres further north, on the sea. The land of the community stretched from the forest and the peak of Kornos to the coast.¹ In 1600 the Orthodox archbishop of Cyprus, in a description of the island for the Duke of Savoy, wrote that of the many villages around Keryneia the largest was Vasileia.² In the 1960 census it had 1,071 inhabitants, of whom 855 were Greeks and 213 Turks.

Name

The origin of the name is not certain. In Italian sources of the 15th century the village is written “Vassiglia” and “Vasiglia”, and on Kitchener’s British map, in the first years of British rule, “Vasilia”. For the name of Vavylas there is no documented explanation.³

Founding and first records

Vasileia first appears in a written source in the 1460s, as “Vassiglia”. The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron names it among the villages that King James II took away from the nobleman Gautier de Nores, and then among the fiefs he gave to the constable of the kingdom, Sor de Naves.⁴

Vavylas was formerly a separate small settlement. In the 1931 census it is still recorded separately, as a chiftlik, that is a large farm estate, while from 1946 its inhabitants are counted together with Vasileia, within whose administrative boundaries it lay. The official place-name index of Cyprus (the Gazetteer) marks it as a settlement on the land of Vasileia.⁵

Archaeological sites

The land of Vasileia has yielded important finds for the beginning of the Bronze Age in pre-Greek Cyprus. In 1935 the Cypriot archaeologist Porphyrios Dikaios, for the Department of Antiquities, recorded near the village a site with surface sherds of the Chalcolithic and the Early Bronze Age. The archaeological survey of the north coast carried out in 1957–1959 for the Department of Antiquities by the British archaeologist Hector Catling and the Cypriot Kyriakos Nicolaou located at Vasileia a settlement inhabited from the Chalcolithic to the so-called Philia phase, at the beginning of the Bronze Age.⁶

The cemeteries of the settlement lie on the hills behind the coastal plain, at the localities Kafkalla and Kylistra. In the autumn of 1955 they were excavated by the Melbourne Expedition, of the University of Melbourne, led by the archaeologist James Stewart and his wife Eve, with the permission of the Department of Antiquities and the agreement of the landowners. They cleared five chamber tombs with long entrance passages, almost all of which had already been robbed by illicit diggers. The only intact one, Kylistra tomb 103, held about 150 vessels, many broken deliberately at the burial, and three stone vessels of gypsum or alabaster, which Stewart considered imported; according to later researchers they most probably came from the Nile valley, a sign of contacts with Egypt. In the passage of a tomb at Kafkalla, hidden under the floor, nine metal objects were found, among them three ring-shaped metal ingots, a spearhead and a knife, of about 2400–2300 BC. About 15% of the metal objects of the Philia phase with known provenance come from the tombs of Vasileia. In the division of the finds the Cyprus Museum kept the best tomb, with the large stone bowl.⁷

In 1965 the Department of Antiquities opened, 800 metres north-west of the village, at the locality Loukkos, at Trachonas, a tomb of ancient Greek Geometric times, partly robbed, in a cemetery that had just been located. The same year it collected at the locality Alonia Chalcolithic pottery, steatite axes, a copper axe and a copper dagger, and in 1972 it excavated another Geometric tomb at Trachonas, 3 kilometres north-west of the village, beside the Lefkosia–Keryneia road. After the invasion, in 1995–1997, the occupation regime carried out a surface survey on the village’s land without a permit.⁸

Antiquity

The settlement and the cemeteries show that Vasileia was an important place in pre-Greek Cyprus in the transition from the Chalcolithic to the Bronze Age. Stewart believed that the place owed its importance to the copper trade, as a harbour at the end of a pass towards the valley of the Ovgos. No habitation of the immediately following period has been found, and researchers most probably connect the abandonment of the settlement with the insecurity attested by the hidden metals.⁹

The Geometric tombs at Trachonas show that the place was inhabited again in the ancient Greek period. At that time the land of Vasileia most probably belonged to the Greek kingdom of Lapithos, which lay a few kilometres to the east.

Frankish and Venetian rule

In the years of Frankish rule Vasileia was a fief of Gautier de Nores, together with Kormakitis, Myrtou, Karpaseia, Kampyli and Margi. In the war for the throne between Queen Charlotte and her half-brother James, de Nores remained loyal to Charlotte. When in 1461 he was captured and brought before James, he refused to swear allegiance to him, because he had sworn to the queen. James took away his villages and imprisoned him, but left him a small pension to live on. According to Bustron, his obstinacy became proverbial in Cyprus: of stubborn people they would say “the faith of Sir Gautier”.¹⁰

Afterwards James II gave Vasileia to Sor de Naves, constable, that is commander-in-chief, of the kingdom. As governor of Keryneia castle on behalf of Charlotte, Sor de Naves had surrendered it to James in 1463. Together with Vasileia he received, among others, Lapithos, Kormakitis, Dikomo and Klepini.¹¹

Shortly after Cyprus passed to the Venetians, Vasileia was a royal village, that is it belonged directly to the state. In a Venetian memorandum of the late 15th century, published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, the “Casal Vasiglia” is recorded among the royal villages of the bailiwick, that is the administrative district, of Lapithos.¹²

Turkish rule

In the land survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Vasileia was a mixed village, with 39 households with property, Christian and Muslim. The owners had wheat fields, a cotton field, orchards with mulberry trees for the silkworm, more than a thousand olive trees, carob, almond and lemon trees, an olive press and plenty of running water. They also had about 450 sheep and goats, cows, oxen, horses and beehives.¹³

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village, dedicated to Saints Constantine and Helen, was built in 1865 and stands in the north-east part of the old centre. The British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus at the beginning of the 20th century, writes in 1918 that Vasileia was a dependency of the Sinai Monastery.¹⁴

The Sinai Monastery, on the village’s land, belonged to the archbishop of Mount Sinai. The 2009 list of occupied churches of the Church of Cyprus dates it to the 18th–19th century. According to Jeffery, it was rebuilt many times, most recently in 1904; in the new building architectural members of the 18th century were reused, while many small granite columns scattered about the site show that some important building once stood there. The metochi (dependency) of the Sinai Monastery is included in the List of Ancient Monuments. To the monastery belonged the chapel of Agia Paraskevi, of 1518, rebuilt in 1903, and the chapel of Agia Marina, at its new metochi. A little south of the village, on a hill, stands also the church of Agia Aikaterini of the Sinai Monastery.¹⁵

High on the Pentadaktylos, in a gorge south-east of the village, through which the path from Lapithos to Larnakas tis Lapithou passed, stands the ruined Monastery of Panagia Kriniotissa, of the 12th–14th century, which is an Ancient Monument. Jeffery found it already in ruins in 1918; the church still kept the vault of its western part, part of the dome and a narthex.¹⁶

On the coast, at the locality Achrantos, stands the chapel of Panagia tis Achrantou, of the 14th century.¹⁷

The Greek Orthodox cemetery, at the western edge of the old centre, about 500 metres west of the church, replaced an older one which the government closed in 1893.¹⁸

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 citrus, vegetables, olives, carobs and cereals were grown at Vasileia, and formerly, according to the Cypriot historian of the early 20th century Ieronymos Peristianis, sesame and cotton, while the inhabitants raised silkworms; cotton and mulberries are already recorded in the 1832/33 survey. In the 19th century and the early 20th Vavylas was a well-known bay for loading carobs, and the carob storehouses stood beside the sea. Before the invasion a fishing shelter operated there.¹⁹ According to the Union of Communities of Keryneia District, the inhabitants also worked at fishing, pottery and quarrying, and the fish taverns of Vavylas attracted many visitors.²⁰ In 1928 the Vasileia Co-operative Credit Society was founded, and in 1955 the Co-operative Grocery.

Education

In the school year 1973–74 two Greek elementary schools operated at Vasileia: the first had 137 pupils and five teachers, the second 46 pupils and five teachers. According to the Union of Communities of Keryneia District, an eight-grade elementary school also operated in the village, where children from the surrounding villages who wanted to learn technical trades instead of going to the gymnasium continued their schooling.²¹

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Vasileia had 477 inhabitants in 1881, 434 in 1891, 521 in 1901, 548 in 1911 and 614 in 1921, and Vavylas 33 in 1891, 30 in 1901, 43 in 1911 and 33 in 1921.²² In 1931 Vasileia had 677 inhabitants, 502 Christians and 175 Muslims, and Vavylas, which was still recorded separately, 47, of whom 42 were Christians and 5 Muslims. In 1946 the community, together with Vavylas, had 877 inhabitants, 684 Orthodox and 193 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,071 inhabitants, 855 Greeks, 213 Turks and three inhabitants of other origin, and in 1973 950 Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 395 inhabitants of Vasileia signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters records 13 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Vasileia and Vavylas were captured by the Turkish army and their Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. The European Commission of Human Rights recorded that refugees who had fled to Morfou tried to return to Vavylas but were not allowed to enter.²³ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants’ return.

Ten inhabitants of Vasileia, seven soldiers and three civilians, were recorded as missing, none of them in the village. The remains of one have been identified; the other nine are still missing. They were lost at Massari (three), at Keryneia (two), on the Karavas–Keryneia road (two), at Belapais, in the area of Glykiotissa and in the area of Lapithos. Eleven inhabitants, six civilians and five soldiers, were killed elsewhere, among other places at the Athalassa Psychiatric Hospital, at Karavas, at Keryneia and at Panagra, while two died at the Lefkosia General Hospital and in Keryneia prison. In the area of Vasileia two were killed, one soldier and one civilian.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Saints Constantine and Helen into a mosque.²⁴ The chapel of Agia Paraskevi was desecrated, looted and is now in ruins, and the chapel of Agia Marina was desecrated and looted. According to the Union of Communities of Keryneia District, a large building was built on top of the chapel of Panagia tis Achrantou.²⁵