The Mesaoria combines every extreme of beauty and ugliness; barren, sand-bedevilled, empty, and under moon-light a haunted waste; then in spring bursting with the shallow splendours of anemone and poppy, and cross-hatched with silk-soft vegetation. Only here you realize that things pushed to extremes become their opposites; the ugly barren Mesaoria and the verdant one are so extreme that one wonders whether the beauty or ugliness has not the greater power.
Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons
When I first visited Agios Sozomenos in February, I was astonished: the land was lush, with tall green stalks of barley waving in the breeze. Just two months later, in mid-April, all the green had dried to the dirty-gold I associate with Mesaoria, the semi-arid plains of Cyprus. This variability was central to the life of everyone who lived in Agios Sozomenos and nearby areas, from the Bronze Age to today.
Agios Sozomenos is built in Mesaoria, near the confluence of the Alikos with the Yialias. This eastern part of the plains was originally a shallow bay that silted up over the past two million years (see Andrea Rowe, The Ayios Sozomenos Region: A Bronze Age Landscape in Cyprus (PhD thesis: University of Sydney, 1995)). Over that time, the rivers have delivered fertile sediments to replenish the soils of the alluvial plains, moving nutrients from the mineral-rich Troodos Mountains into the lowlands. These river valley floors are topped by kafkallia, a type of hard limestone that is resistant to weathering and thus lends itself to a topography of mesas, buttes, and plateaus overlooking the rivers. The Yialias may have been more powerful in the past, but in the past 6000 years the river has not incised itself more than 6 metres (Frank L. Koucky and Reuben G. Bullard, “The Geology of Idalion,” in American Expedition to Idalion, Cyprus: First Preliminary Report: Seasons of 1971 and 1972 (Cambridge, MA: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1974), p. 17). Yet even when the rivers don’t flow, there is underground water easily available by digging shallow wells.
I transcribed and translated the following documentary created as a project by journalism students at the University of Cyprus, which includes interviews with both Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot former residents of Agios Sozomenos. I am grateful to Danae Michael, Andreas Paphitis, and Raphaella Stavrinou for their work and letting me translate their video.
[NARRATOR:] Agios Sozomenos: a village of the Nicosia District, between Geri and Potamia. A small village, which was once shared by Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, living peacefully under mud-brick roofs. The only thing that separated them was a road.
If you happen to pass by the fields of the village, you probably don’t realize the history hidden in their soil. The fields were once playful, carefree places — symbols of unity, coexistence, and trust.
All of this until 6 February 1964, when the village’s fate would take a decisive turn. That was when the fields were transformed into symbols of suspicion, division, and conflict. The occasion for this transformation was the intercommunal strife of 1963–64, which could not have left the village unaffected.
On 6 February 1964, fighting broke out in Agios Sozomenos that left 6 Greek Cypriots and 7 Turkish Cypriots dead, and led to the abandonment of the village by all of its residents. Here, I present the narrative of those events as we can reconstruct them from the surviving sources.
The issue of Phileleftheros on 6 February 1964 led with the headline “Cyprus was Painted with Fresh Blood from Turkish Chauvinists”.
Turkish Cypriots who recount the event start the story on 21 December 1963, when there was also fighting over the water pumping station in Agios Sozomenos, or even 30 October 1963, when a Turkish-Cypriot shepherd was kidnapped. For them, the events of 6 February were part of a series of escalating events that disrupted peace in the village.
On Thursday 6 February itself, fighting broke out over the water pumping station (υδραγωγείο), which controlled water access to the larger villages of Athienou and Pyroi, as well as Agios Sozomenos itself. According to multiple Greek Cypriots interviewed after the events, a group of six police escorted an official of the municipality to the water pumping station in order to open a valve. As they were nearing the Alikos river near the village, they came under fire from an ambush of a handful of Turkish Cypriots who were hidden on the opposite bank. The automatic weapons riddled the Land Rover with bullet holes and killed the driver and one other passenger instantly, with the car veering out of control and a subsequent exchange of fire.
Reinforcements of Greek-Cypriot police arrived, and fighting continued between the two sides. (It’s unclear how many of those fighting were from Agios Sozomenos itself, although the police were certainly from other parts and the Turkish Cypriots involved in the ambush were from the village itself.) British troops were dispatched to calm the situation and tend to the wounded. The British took 4 to 5 hours to calm the situation, imposing a ceasefire and tending to the wounded.
The immediate result were 5 Greek Cypriots dead and 12 wounded, with 1 seriously injured person dying the next day. 7 Turkish Cypriots were reported dead and 15 wounded. (It’s worth noting that the village itself was predominantly Turkish; inhabitants say there were 30 Turkish-Cypriot families and 6 Greek-Cypriot ones, with census data from 1960 saying there were 172 TC inhabitants and 25 Greek Cypriots. One former resident said that most Greek Cypriots left the village even before fighting broke out, so that there were only two old Greeks left in the village on 6 February.) The Turkish Cypriot press subsequently claimed that there was no ambush per se, but rather 6 Greek Cypriots who came with the intent of terrorizing the inhabitants of Agios Sozomenos. Nonetheless, it is clear that the fighting started with conflict over the water pumping station when the Land Rover driven by Greek Cypriot police was attacked by Turkish Cypriots.
The dead Greek Cypriots were honored in Parliament the next day, and given funerals in their own villages and cities. Particularly notable is the case of Demetris Chamatsos, who was an 18-year-old student at the vocational school in Nicosia. Today, there is a statue dedicated to him in the nearby village of Dali. Among Turkish Cypriots, an 11-year-old boy named Ismail died in the fighting.
The village was evacuated under the supervision of British forces, with most Turkish Cypriot villagers going to the nearby enclave of Louroujina (Akincilar). They subsequently moved to other parts of Cyprus, with many ending up in Nicosia and many other in Argaki near Morphou (Güzelyurt). The remaining Greek Cypriots joined those who had fled earlier in the nearby villages of Geri, Pyroi, and Potamia. When Turkish Cypriots returned to the village several years later, they found the mosque destroyed and many of the houses in ruins.
This event took place within the context of rising tensions between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and the breakdown of constitutional order, commonly known as the “disturbances” of 1963–64. In the aftermath of the fighting in Agios Sozomenos, many political actors appealed for calm (including President Makarios, AKEL, and the Confederation of Trade Organizations). Nonetheless, the situation continued to escalate. On 4 March 1964, the Security Council agreed to adopt Resolution 186, which established the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus. UNFICYP continues to patrol Cyprus until today.
For more information on the aftermath and context of these events, see the following two excellent films, which feature both testimony and archival footage:
Primary sources
I consulted the following sources in detail to construct the above narrative:
I wrote this as a short ten-minute presentation of an ongoing research project on Agios Sozomenos. For more information, please visit the landing page here.
If you visit the abandoned village of Agios Sozomenos when the wind blows the right way, an unmistakable scent wafts through the air: cow manure. Green stalks of barley stood proud in the fields nearby when I arrived on one sunny day in spring. Visitors stream to the ruins every day — farmers done with their chores, suburban office workers taking the day off, wannabe Instagram influencers, and seemingly everyone in-between. It doesn’t take long to start wondering: just why does this place attract so many different people? Answering this question, I argue, helps us see how this site functions as a public thing that brings people together, in all their plurality, around a common object.
