Vasili is a Greek community of the occupied district of Ammochostos, on the Karpasia peninsula. It lies 44 kilometres northeast of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 140 metres. It is built almost against Leonarisso, to its west, and the two villages, as the British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus, observed in 1918, practically formed one.¹ In the 1960 census it had 391 inhabitants, all Greeks.

Name

The village church is dedicated to Saint Basil (Agios Vasileios). According to the Union of Displaced Communities of Ammochostos, the inhabitants said that the village took its name either from Saint Basil or from its first inhabitant, a man called Vasilis.² According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the 19th-century writer G. S. Frangoudis calls it “Agios Vasileios” and writes that together with Leonarisso it formed “almost one and the same village”.³

Archaeological sites

South-east of the village, at the place that the official gazetteer of Cyprus records as Mazerades, the British archaeologist David Hogarth, who travelled through the Karpasia in 1888, saw on a rocky ridge the ruins of an ancient settlement covering almost half a mile. He found only large blocks and oil-press stones, with no architectural members. In its southern part there were twelve tombs cut into the rock, already plundered, with wide entrances and chambers often circular. From these Hogarth judged, with caution, that the settlement probably belonged to the 6th or 5th century BC, that is, to the Archaic or Classical Greek period. Lower down, at Kakozonara, he noted a second, small site around a well. The same ruins and the twelve tombs are also described a little later by the Greek philologist Athanasios Sakellarios, who travelled in Cyprus in the 19th century.⁴

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, five households with property are recorded at Vasili. They had fields of cotton and fodder crops, a mulberry garden with a mangani, that is, a well with a water-wheel, a threshing floor, two mills turned by horses, a few oxen, mules and fifty sheep.⁵

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of Agios Vasileios, in the south-western part of the village, was built in 1910; in 1918 Jeffery found it rebuilt. Around it lay the old cemetery, which was closed in 1925. The new cemetery, east of the village on the road to Rizokarpaso, has the chapel of Agios Tryfon.⁶

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew cereals, carobs, olives, tobacco and some citrus, on a few dozen skales of irrigated land, and kept mainly sheep.⁷ The village Co-operative Credit Society was founded in 1926 and the Co-operative Store in 1936.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Vasili had 183 inhabitants in 1881, 227 in 1891, 277 in 1901, 324 in 1911 and 336 in 1921.⁸ In 1931 it had 358 inhabitants, 331 Christians and 27 Muslims, and in 1946 471, of whom 421 were Orthodox and 50 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 391 inhabitants, all Greeks, and in 1973 362 Greeks.

National struggles

In the 1950 plebiscite for Union with Greece 250 inhabitants signed, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants. The EOKA Fighters’ Register records 94 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Vasili was occupied by the Turkish army. Most of the inhabitants, as in other villages of the Karpasia, stayed in their homes and found themselves in confinement, enclaved. According to the UN reports cited by the European Commission of Human Rights, the enclaved lived in difficult conditions, with restrictions on their movement outside the bounds of their villages.⁹

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, in October 1975 there were still 260 Greeks living in the village. In 1976 the primary school of neighbouring Leonarisso operated for a short time, and children of enclaved families from Vasili attended it too. But the inhabitants were being expelled at a fast pace: by August 1976 only 30 were left, and by November of the same year all had been expelled.¹⁰ The Greek population of Vasili was thus ethnically cleansed, and since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

One inhabitant of Vasili, a soldier, was recorded as missing in the area of Mia Milia; his remains have been located and identified. Two more inhabitants of the village were killed elsewhere, a civilian at Ormideia and a soldier in the area of Agios Pavlos at Lapithos. One person killed, a civilian, is recorded in the village itself.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Vasileios into a mosque and removed the crosses and the bell. When a new mosque was built in the village, the church was abandoned. All the doors and windows of the chapel of Agios Tryfon have been removed, and its interior is empty. In 2022 the cemetery was in ruins, its wall collapsed almost to the foundations.¹¹