Vokolida is a Greek community of the occupied district of Ammochostos, on the Karpasia peninsula. It lies 31 kilometres northeast of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 10 metres, near the south coast of the peninsula, between Tavrou and Agios Theodoros. On the shore, within the village’s land, stands the chapel of Agia Thekla. In the 1960 census it had 337 inhabitants, all Greeks.

Name

According to the villagers’ tradition, as recorded by the president of the village’s Community Council, the name is connected with the boukoloi, that is, the herdsmen of oxen, who grazed their herds on the plains around the village.¹ At the end of the 19th century the village was also written “Voukolida”, and in this form it was printed in the results of the 1950 Enosis plebiscite.²

Founding and first records

The earliest written records of Vokolida found so far date from Venetian rule. According to the historian Nasa Patapiou, who researches the Venetian state archives on Cyprus, the village is marked as “Vocolida” on the map of Cyprus drawn in 1542 by the Cypriot engineer Leonidas Attar, and it appears in all four Venetian lists of the villages of Cyprus known to date.³ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, it is also marked on the maps of the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius (1573), as “Vocolida”, and of the Venetian cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli (1689), as “Vecolida”.⁴

Venetian rule

Vokolida, like the whole of Karpasia, then came under the Venetian governor of Ammochostos. According to Patapiou, in the census of 1565 the village had 62 male francomati, that is, free cultivators; the paroikoi (dependent peasants), the women and the children were not recorded. In 1561–62 the bailo, that is, the governor, of Karpasia, Frangiskos Kallergis, appointed as tsivitanos of Vokolida, a kind of village constable, Lorentzos son of Mousis from the village itself, and as baniero, that is, field guard, Zias son of Loïs from Agios Theodoros. Another man of Vokolida, Livieris son of Tzortzis, was at the same time baniero in the neighbouring village of Agia Varvara, which no longer exists. In 1560 the coasts of Agios Theodoros and Vokolida were guarded by a company of 24 light horsemen under Ioannis Rontakis, who was killed in 1571 defending Ammochostos against the Ottomans.⁵

Turkish rule

In the property survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who owned property, Vokolida is recorded as a Christian village with 14 property-holding households. Much of their land lay uncultivated; on the rest they sowed mainly cotton and fodder crops. They had a few olive and fig trees, beehives and a watermill, which was then out of use, as well as 170 sheep and goats, 24 oxen and cows and five horses.⁶

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, which cites the British researcher of the monuments of Cyprus Rupert Gunnis, the remains of an Austrian steamer wrecked there in 1860 could still be seen near the shore. The villagers told Gunnis that the ship was carrying emigrants to America, who mutinied, and that the captain deliberately ran it onto the rocks; the emigrants drowned, while he and the crew got safely ashore.⁷

Churches and monasteries

The parish church of the village is dedicated to Saint George, its patron saint, and dates from the 18th century. The Greek philologist Athanasios Sakellarios, who travelled in Cyprus in the 19th century, describes Voukolida as a small village with very fertile fields, where a small church of the Greek medieval period also survived.⁸

About two kilometres east of the village, on the sea, stands the Greek Orthodox chapel of Agia Thekla.⁹ The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, saw it in 1918 as a simple rustic chapel on the coast.¹⁰ According to the president of the Community Council, the holy spring of Agia Thekla wells up through the rocks, in front of the waves.¹¹

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew mainly cereals, carobs and olives, with no irrigated land, and kept sheep and goats. Parts of the state forests of Pyrogia and Vokolida and the small forest of Dianoullia lay within the village’s boundaries.¹² According to the president of the Community Council, the Livadia of Vokolida stretched along the shore: sandy fields, each with a small well of fresh water, where the villagers grew watermelons and vegetables; around the village there were large stretches of fig trees.¹³ In 1945 the Vokolida Cooperative Credit Society was founded.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Vokolida had 170 inhabitants in 1881, 188 in 1891, 204 in 1901, 281 in 1911 and 294 in 1921.¹⁴ In 1931 it had 354 inhabitants, all Christians, and in 1946 428, all Orthodox (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 337 inhabitants and in 1973 336, all Greeks. In the school year 1973–74 the village’s Greek primary school had 54 pupils and two teachers.

National struggles

In the 1950 Enosis plebiscite 226 inhabitants signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 52 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Vokolida was occupied by the Turkish army. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, almost all the inhabitants fled before the advancing Turkish army, and about 30 stayed in the village, enclaved.¹⁵ According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, in October 1975 31 Greeks were still in the village; they were driven out gradually, and the last left in August 1976.¹⁶ The Greek population of Vokolida was thus ethnically cleansed, and since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the inhabitants from returning.

One inhabitant of the village, a soldier, was recorded as missing; he disappeared at Voni, and his remains have been located and identified. In the village itself two dead are recorded, both elderly civilian inhabitants who had stayed on, enclaved.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of Agios Georgios into a mosque. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, when a new mosque was built in the village the church was abandoned; when it was recorded in 2022 its crosses, its bells and all the furnishings of an Orthodox church had been removed, and it had serious cracks. The village’s new cemetery was in ruins, with no trace left of the crosses of the graves.¹⁷