Vitsada is a mixed community in the occupied district of Ammochostos. It lies 30 kilometres northwest of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 60 metres, on the northern edge of the Mesaoria plain, near the foothills of the Pentadaktylos.¹ In the 1960 census it had 402 inhabitants, of whom 266 were Greeks and 136 Turks.

Name

The 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron writes the village in the plural, “Vizzades”, that is, Vitsades; the official gazetteer of Cyprus has Vitsada.²

Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) period

According to the British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, a shrine of this period with statues was discovered at Vitsada in 1893.³

Frankish rule, Venetian rule

The first written record of the village dates from 1307. According to Bustron, when Amaury, lord of Tyre, had taken power from his brother King Henry II, he sought to arrest Baldwin of Ibelin, having learned that he had been reconciled with the king. Baldwin was then at his village, Vitsades, and, warned by his friends, took refuge in Nicosia, in the archbishop’s palace.⁴ According to Jeffery, Vitsada was known to the medieval cartographers.⁵

Turkish rule

At the end of the 18th century the Cypriot historian Archimandrite Kyprianos names Vitsada among the villages whose revenues went to pay the janissaries.⁶ In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Vitsada is described as a mixed village, with 26 property-owning households. Their fields were cotton fields, with a vegetable garden, threshing floors and much barren land, and they had twenty-three olive trees. They had more than five hundred sheep, cows, pairs of oxen, horses and mules, and beehives.⁷

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of Vitsada, in the centre of the old settlement, is dedicated to Saint Mamas and dates from the 19th century. In the cemetery, east of the village, there is a second church of the same saint.⁸

Economy and society

According to the government publication of 2019 on the displaced municipalities and communities, the inhabitants lived mainly from cereals and stock-breeding, kept much poultry and grew fruit, lemons, citrons and vegetables. Northwest of the village there are gypsum deposits, and in earlier times the inhabitants burned gypsum in kilns.⁹ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, while the Cyprus railway operated, from 1905 to 1951, Vitsada had a station.¹⁰ The Co-operative Credit Society of Vitsada was founded in 1946.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Vitsada had 242 inhabitants in 1881, 236 in 1891, 272 in 1901, 302 in 1911 and 271 in 1921.¹¹ In 1931 it had 293 inhabitants, 166 Christians and 127 Muslims, and in 1946 345, of whom 225 were Orthodox and 120 Muslims (the censuses of 1931 and 1946 recorded religion only). In 1960 it had 402 inhabitants, 266 Greeks and 136 Turks, and in 1973 317 Greeks. In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school had 59 pupils and two teachers.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 117 inhabitants of Vitsada signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters records 61 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or assisted the Struggle. According to the biography published by the EOKA Liberation Struggle Foundation, in 1958 the fighter Ilias Papakyriakou of Lythragkomi organised the militia of the Greeks in the villages of the Vitsada–Marathovounos area.¹²

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Vitsada was occupied by the Turkish army and its Greek population was ethnically cleansed. After its capture the village became one of the main detention centres for Greek civilians in the occupied area. The European Commission of Human Rights found that hundreds of people were held in confinement in schools and churches at Gypsou, Marathovounos, Vitsada, Voni and Morphou. In the Red Cross tables submitted to the Commission Vitsada has 569 detainees, among them 114 who were transferred there from Marathovounos on 5 October 1974. The Commission recorded written statements describing beatings of detainees at Vitsada; it was unable, however, fully to determine the conditions of detention there, because the centre had been evacuated to Gypsou before the agreements of November 1974 on the transfer of the detainees to the free areas.¹³ Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

Eleven people killed in 1974 are recorded at Vitsada, all of them civilians. Four inhabitants of the village, all civilians, were recorded as missing; all four disappeared at Strongylos. The remains of three have been located and identified, while one is still missing.

The 2009 list records the church of Agios Mamas as a mosque. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the occupation authorities illegally converted it into a mosque after 1974; its south entrance was walled up to make a mihrab, and its crosses were removed. When a new mosque was built in the village, around 2019–20, the church was abandoned. In the cemetery the graves are in poor condition and the crosses lie scattered.¹⁴