This is the landing page for ongoing research on Agios Sozomenos, an abandoned village near Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, with a multi-layered past and complexly resonating present. This page provides an outline and links to further resources. For a short presentation of my own research project, see my post here.
I am very interested in hearing any comments or suggestions, or even just a brief word about how you came across this page. Please send me an email by clicking the icon at the top of this page — I would love to hear from you!
Points of interest
- Points of interest
- Archaeology nearby (Bronze Age)
- The cave chapel and Byzantine church (medieval)
- The Latin church
- The Turkish-Cypriot village
- The events of 1964
- Dendrochronology
- Graffiti (across time)
- Other recent projects
- Visitors today
- Acknowledgements
Agios Sozomenos is found on the banks of the Alikos river, just before it joins the more significant Yialias, in a valley flanked by high bluffs (for more on the site’s geology and agriculture, see this post). These cliffs are home to many birds, which swoop around the valley and make their nest in the recesses. In February and March, the fields are verdant and dotted with daisies and other wildflowers, which dry to a golden color as spring turns into summer. The area is very fertile, with nutrients in the soil replenished by the rivers when they flow down from the mountains each winter. It traditionally grew mostly barley, depending on the winter rains, but today also grows alfafa irrigated with treated sewage water. Today, the site is at the outskirts of Nicosia, not far from the industrial area of Dali. The closest village is Potamia, one of the few villages in which Greek and Turkish Cypriots live together until today. The area of the Alikos and Agios Sozomenos has been designated as a Natura 2000 site; a comprehensive (265-page!) report on the area’s flora, fauna, and geology was prepared as part of this designation and can be found here.
A good introduction to the site is this documentary film (English transcript here) made by students from the University of Cyprus, which includes beautiful shots of all of these points of interest and interviews with both Greek and Turkish Cypriot former residents of the village:
Archaeology nearby (Bronze Age)
Excavations in recent years (since 2016), directed by Despina Pilides of the Cypriot Department of Antiquities, have focused on Bronze Age remains found on hills near the abandoned village. Pilides writes that the “dense and extensive pattern of settlement surrounding the Yialias River and the three large fortified sites on top of the plateau, support the identification of the Ayios Sozomenos region as an important economic and political centre at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age.” More information here, here, and here. Most recently, Eilis Monahan and Matthew Spigelman (who also worked on Pilides’ project) have argued that “these fortresses should not be understood only as symptoms of political transformation, but are instead active participants in the restructuring of Cypriot society” in the Late Bronze Age.
These most recent excavations build on a long history of archaeological activity in the area, summarized by Pilides as follows:
Together, these many excavations testify to a long history of habitation, which itself reflects the geomorphology of the site: how the rivers replenish the nutrients of the alluvial plains, supporting the growing of barley and other agriculture. For more information on these aspects, see my post here.
The cave chapel and Byzantine church (medieval)
The village was named after a cave chapel and former hermitage of the eponymous saint, Sozomenos (literally “the one who was saved”). The first synaxarion (i.e. vita, or saint’s life) of Sozomenos dates to 1780 — over 700 years since his actual life. However, the Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas does mention a “Saint Sozomenos of Potamia” in his chronicle (“εἰς τὴν Ποταμίαν ὁ ἅγιο(ς) Σωζόμενος”, here in §32). We also have a number of mentions of Sozomenos in Cypriot manuscripts, including this one from the 16th century, currently at the British Library:
However, in these manuscripts and other places it is unclear whether the same Agios Sozomenos is meant; there is also a famous Saint Sozomenos after whom another widely-visited church in the village of Galata is named. These may or may not be the same person, who in turn may or may not be one of the so-called “Three Hundred Alaman Saints” or a Saint Sozomenos of Karpasia.
Our main source for information on the saint is the cave chapel itself. The frescoes are in poor condition generally; some damage is the result of humidity, while some may be the result of vandalism. Papageorgiou writes that “the Turks destroyed many of the wall paintings … [and] destroyed the eyes of the Saints.” The cave was stopped up in 1912, when a wall was built after Greek Cypriots in the village complained to a British court that Turkish Cypriots were using the chapel as a sheepfold.
Regardless, these paintings are our best source for the Byzantine history of Agios Sozomenos. They come in three layers, with the latest dating to the 14th century and the earliest to the 10th century (these oldest paintings were removed and taken to the Byzantine Museum in Nicosia). The latest layer narrates miracles attributed to Sozomenos: how he heals the sick, how he came to live and die in the cave, and how the site is still endowed with healing powers. Other than the paintings, the cave has niches with icons and candles; a little agiasma (sacred water fountain); and what seems to be the saint’s tomb carved into the back of the cave. However, the saint’s remains were removed: Machairas writes that “when the patriarch of Antioch Ignatius II came to Nicosia in the middle of the fourteenth century, he commissioned a wooden cross containing the relics of forty-four saints, including Saint Sozomenos of Potamia, which was kept in a royal foundation and used for processions against disease and natural disasters such as locusts and droughts” (Bakirtzis, p. 100).
The paintings in the cave chapel show the saint standing in front of a building, which Bakirtzis has identified as the Byzantine church in the village below. Bakirtzis writes that
These images were part of the effort to establish the chapel as a cult center through the documentation of the saint’s ‘credentials’ for sainthood. At the same time they emphasized the cave chapel’s function as a pilgrimage site anchored around the saint’s tomb and his legacy as a healer. … There is little doubt that the artist intended to provide a recognizable visual reference for pilgrims visiting Sozomenos’s hermitage and to locate the saint at the site of the church of the Virgin, thus extending the sacred realm of his healing presence.
Bakirtzis, “Revisiting the Monastic Legacy of Saint Sozomenos,” pp. 95–99.
The church Bakirtzis refers to is the main Byzantine church of the village. Most descriptions of the village and the cave chapel ignore or denigrate this church; Camille Enlart, for instance, called it “a small and wretched Byzantine building” (a remark that was, of course, colored by the colonialist and nationalist bias of a French art historian writing in 1899). It was built in two phases: first as a square-ish building that is shown in the wall paintings in the cave chapel and then extended to the west. A blocked door is visible on the northern side of the initial section. Two wall paintings survive: a section of a man on a horse with a cape behind him, probably Saint George, and a painting of the Virgin on the interior southern wall. For Bakirtzis, what is important about this church is how it is woven into the cultural and religious fabric of the village. Specifically, it is clearly depicted behind Saint Sozomenos in the paintings in the cave chapel.
More information on the site is provided in the following articles (in chronological order): Nearchos I. Clerides, “Ο Άγιος Σωζόμενος, προλεγόμενα και κείμενο της Ακολουθίας,” Κυπριακαί Σπουδαί 2 (1938): 105–20; Athanasios Papageorgiou, “Λαξευτά ασκητήρια και μοναστήρια στην Κύπρο,” Επετηρίδα Κέντρου Μελετών Ιεράς Μονής Κύκκου 4 (1999): 33–96; Andréas Nicolaïdès and Catherine Vanderheyde, “La topographie cultuelle chrétienne de la région de Potamia-Agios Sozoménos,” Cahiers du Centre d’Etudes Chypriotes 34, no. 1 (2004): 251–66; and Nikolas Bakirtzis, “Revisiting the Monastic Legacy of Saint Sozomenos Near Potamia,” in The Art and Archaeology of Lusignan and Venetian Cyprus (1192–1571): Recent Research and New Discoveries, ed. Michalis Olympios and Maria G. Parani, Studies in the Visual Cultures of the Middle Ages, vol. 12 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2019), 83–100. Additional information is provided in George Jeffery, A Description of the Historic Monuments of Cyprus (Nicosia: 1918 [reprinted London: Zeno, 1983]), 206; Camille Enlart, Gothic Art and the Renaissance in Cyprus (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1899 [reprinted London: Trigraph, 1987]), especially 170–172; Andreas Stylianou and Judith Stylianou, The Painted Churches of Cyprus: Treasures of Byzantine Art (Nicosia: A. G. Leventis Foundation, 1997), 511–515; and the 1990 Annual Report of the Department of Antiquities, 20.
The Latin church
Many visitors to Agios Sozomenos climb the hill to the cave chapel. But many others today remain in the village, where they are immediately struck by the Gothic ruins of the never-completed Latin church. This church is dedicated to Agios Mamas, according to a modern placard, but we actually know little about it. Bakirtzis understands the church as evidence that Sozomenos’ cult was alive and well under Latin rule; indeed, the area was quite prosperous. Enlart notes that “its land was part of the royal demesne, a dependency of the villa of Potamia.” Rather than seeing the previous religious traditions as a threat, Bakirtzis says, the new Latin rulers integrated the healing cult of the saint into the cultural landscape.
The church was never completed, probably due to a lack of funds. This is evident from some of the decorative stonework, which stops abruptly halfway up some of the arches, and from the structural integrity of the arches and piers, which would not have survived a collapse intact. Various dates have been proposed between the 14th and 16th centuries, aligning it with other churches in Cyprus with similar architectural elements from that time. There are also two arcosolia: arched recesses in the wall in which patrons were buried. Thomas Kaffenberger argues that
work most likely began at some point in the second or third quarter of the sixteenth century. … It seems likely that the building was commissioned by a member of one of the Greek Cypriot noble families with links to Venice, with the intention of creating a burial place for himself and his family. At the same time, the church presumably imitated to a certain extent the models of veneration sites of Saints Mamas, Neophytos, and Epiphanios in an attempt to revive the cult of Saint Sozomenos. If the building was abandoned and left unfinished, then the Ottoman conquest seems to be the only logical explanation. At that moment, the political situation changed drastically, to the extent that returning to the site and continuing with the construction of the vault would have exceeded the financial means of the patrons. The tiny church of the Panagia nearby remained in use as a village church, while interest in the revival of the saint’s cult faded.
Kaffenberger, “A Rural Church for an Urban Elite?,” 124. See also Kaffenberger’s 2016 PhD thesis Tradition and Identity: The Architecture of Greek Churches in Cyprus, pp. 266–268 in volume I and especially pp. 40–47 in volume II.
It is tempting to make this church a symbol of Latin rule in Cyprus: accommodating and syncretic of existing religious traditions in some ways, but imposing their own culture as a crusader kingdom in others; initially prosperous, based on large-scale agriculture, but increasingly under threat from the Ottoman Empire; and today remembered chiefly by the romantic ruins that catch the visitor’s eyes.
The Turkish-Cypriot village
The PRIO Cyprus Centre provides census information that helps us understand the shifting population of the village:
Between 1571, when Cyprus fell to the Ottomans, and 1831, when the first census was taken, Agios Sozomenos became a mixed village. What does this mean? Was there settlement by foreigners, or did local people convert to Islam and learn Turkish? The answer to this question implicates today’s politics in complicated ways. Paschalis Kitromilides writes that
Coexistence in a traditional society was founded on a shared folk piety and a common life style conditioned by the agricultural cycle of rural life. … No predictable geographic pattern of ethnic settlement exists largely because a great part of the Moslem rural population was created by the Islamization over time of Christian village communities. This was a common practice in Ottoman years and was either the product of outright coercion or forced choice in view of escape from the capitation tax that came with conversion to Islam. The names of Christian Saints borne by several Turkish Cypriot villages … offer a convincing indication of these cases of Islamization. It should be made clear in this connection that this sort of evidence is not cited here in order to question the Turkish Cypriots’ Turkishness — which as is the case with modern national identity generally, has to do more with states of consciousness and less with the “purity” of ethnic origins.
Paschalis Kitromilides, “From Coexistence To Confrontation: The Dynamics Of Ethnic Conflict In Cyprus,” in Cyprus Reviewed, ed. Michael Attalides (Nicosia: Jus Cypri Association, 1977), 35–70.
One of these villages named after Christian saints but inhabited mostly by Turkish Cypriots was, of course, Agios Sozomenos. After 1950, the village was given the Turkish name “Arpalık,” which means simply “place of barley.” After all, the site was extremely fertile and well-suited to growing large fields of barley and similar crops, watered by the Alikos and Yialias rivers. By the turn of the twentieth century, Turkish Cypriots (TC) outnumbered Greek Cypriots (GC) by a margin that grew significantly up until the inhabitants fled in 1964. Today, it is easy for visitors to overlook the long presence of Turkish Cypriots at the site for many visitors, since the village is dominated by three churches, with a few crumbling mud-brick buildings still scattered around them. At the same time, for many other visitors Agios Sozomenos remains primarily a site of trauma.
The events of 1964
On 6 February 1964, fighting broke out in Agios Sozomenos that left 6 Greek Cypriots and 7 Turkish Cypriots dead. The village was abandoned as a result. For more details on the events of the day, see my post here. Three films provide excellent context and history.
This film, produced in 1987, is called Λεπτομέρεια στην Κύπρο (A Detail in Cyprus) and was produced and directed by Panicos Chrysanthou. It features interviews with both Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot residents of the village, archival footage, and evocative images of the site as it stood in 1987, 23 years after its abandonment but before the modern influx of tourists. I would strongly recommend watching it.
A second film was produced by RIK (the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation) in 2017 as an episode of their series Ταξίδι στο Χρόνο (Traveling in Time). It combines interviews with witnesses of the events of 1964 with footage from RIK’s own archives. A strongly opposing viewpoint is provided in this recent film about the events of 1964 produced by the British Turkish Cypriot Association. It is most valuable as a source for interviews with Turkish Cypriots who fled Agios Sozomenos, and furthermore includes valuable archival footage — some from the two films mentioned above, and some additional, too.
Dendrochronology
One of the many ways this site has been approached by researchers is through dendrochronology — sampling timber to find dates and provenance by analyzing tree ring data. A publication produced jointly by Cornell University and the Cyprus Institute gives the results from eight samples at the site, as shown below:
Two conclusions are worth noting. First, most of the dates are fairly recent, clustering around the nineteenth century. Second, the team hypothesizes that the Scots pine of Scandinavian origin (Pinus sylvestris) was used in the 50s and 60s “when doorways and windows were strengthened and blocked because of heavy inter-communal fighting prior to village abandonment.”
Graffiti (across time)
One of the aspects of the site that we continue to explore are the diverse graffiti, stretching from medieval graffiti scratched into the frescoes in the cave chapel to nationalist slogans from the mid-twentieth century to common football slogans from today. Thus, Sozomenos is one of the few sites in Cyprus with a really continuous practice of graffiti, from pre-Ottoman to today, covering a wide range of devotional, political, and artistic practices.
In the cave chapel, there are numerous graffiti that are clearly pre-modern and likely pre-Ottoman. For instance:
Perhaps the most interesting graffito from the cave chapel is this inscription in Arabic script (probably in Turkish):
In the village, there is nationalist graffiti probably dating to 1964 or shortly thereafter. And all around, today, there is modern graffiti and (so-called) street art.
Other recent projects
In recent years, many visitors, researchers, and artists have found their own fertile ground in Agios Sozomenos. For instance, Andri Tsiouti, an architect, created a project called Traces of Memory in the Landscape; Ayios Sozomenos. I am grateful for her permission to reproduce here the map she created (which was also the basis for the map I display above). The identification of the sites was confirmed by interviews with former residents of the village.
More recent projects include a 2017 eco-journalism workshop hosted by the Laona Foundation; the launch of the “Federal Cyprus Initiative” from the site in 2014; and a 2018 workshop for artists and architects called ‘Ayios Sozomenos – place of barley’ _ ‘Timeless Encounters’.
Visitors today
Even a quick search on the internet demonstrates that the place resonates strongly with inhabitants today. On Instagram we find everything from wedding shoots; to lots of modeling; to breakdancing; to astrophotography; to what appear to be raves (and is in fact a self-proclaimed “psychedelic stoner rock festival”). On YouTube, we find drone footage galore (including one video showing the Alikos actually flowing!); a number of vlogs of varying merit (including multiple videos by Filipino tourists!); and some blatantly nationalistic propaganda. In short, this site is immensely popular with casual visitors. Bakirtzis writes that many of these people on a day trip from Nicosia are “pilgrims arriving daily to pay their respects to this Cypriot healing saint.” Some of them are; for others, it’s the events of 1964 that weigh heaviest in their impression; and for yet others, the site is “merely” a place of beauty.
On one Saturday morning, I found the following among the diverse visitors to the site: a middle-aged bicyclist (Greek-Cypriot); a young student (sports science at University of Nicosia) by himself, who said “I saw it on Facebook”; two older ladies, South African Cypriots, also first-time visitors; an older man from Dikomo with his two grandsons, who first visited 10 years ago; American tourists from Texas; someone who was visibly a drug addict and crossed himself when entering the church; families with young children flying kites in an early celebration of Green Monday and visiting the cave chapel; and teenage girls taking photos in the ruins. All this in addition to myself and my colleagues visiting the site — anthropologists, Byzantinists, historians, archaeologists, and various scientists. This diversity is indicative of the kinds of visitors who are attracted to Agios Sozomenos today.
My own research interests are prompted by the observation of the remarkable power of this site to bring people together. What is it about this place that pulls together people in their plurality, making of Agios Sozomenos a public thing, a space for politics in the Arendtian sense? To answer this question, I undertake archival and ethnographic research to study the site and couple that with community engagement efforts that aim to create connections through this site among a plurality of interlocutors. For instance, I led a tour of the village with Greek and Turkish Cypriot youth through Usurum, a bicommunal initiative supported by the Home for Cooperation. More on this, too, coming soon!
Acknowledgements
This work has been undertaken at the Cyprus Institute’s Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center (STARC). At the Cyprus Institute, I am particularly grateful for the support and advice of Nikolas Bakirtzis, George Artopoulos, and Sorin Hermon; Mehmetcan Soyluoglu, Mia Trentin, Adriana Bruggeman and Christina Kakkoura; and beyond the Cyprus Institute, Thomas Kaffenberger, Marios Hadjianastasis, Bernard Knapp, Panicos Chrysanthou, Sevina Floridou, Maria Averkiou, Andri Tsiouti, Raphaella Stavrinou, the Press and Information Office and State Archives of the Republic of Cyprus, the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, and the Center for Visual Arts and Research at the Severis Foundation in Nicosia.