14 Abandoned Villages of Cyprus
Cyprus is one of the most historically layered islands in the Mediterranean. Underneath the resort towns and the beach clubs and the well-worn tourist trails, there is another Cyprus entirely. It shows up in the form of stone houses with no roofs, churchyards with no congregation, and village squares where the only regular visitors are photographers and the occasional goat. The abandoned villages of Cyprus number in the dozens, scattered across every district on the island. Some were emptied by war. Some by flood. Some by the slow, quiet pull of better economic prospects in the cities. This guide covers 14 of them, what they were, why they emptied, and what you will actually find if you make the drive out. Turkish Cypriot Abandoned Villages in South Cyprus When the intercommunal violence of the 1960s escalated and the events of 1974 redrew the political map of Cyprus, the displacement was not one-directional. Tens of thousands of Turkish Cypriots who had lived in the south moved north, leaving behind villages, farmland, and houses that stood empty from that point forward. The villages in this section represent that specific history. They are not ruins in the archaeological sense. They are communities that functioned within living memory, and the evidence of that functioning is still physically present in the stone and the soil.…
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