Abandoned Villages on Cyprus

On my long flight home, I read Andrea Villani’s “Vanishing Villages: Exploring Habitation and Abandonment in the Dhiarizos Valley, Cyprus, and Surrounding Areas,” in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology (2025). The article studies the abandoned villages in the Dhiarizos Valley in the Paphos districted. Villani does this through field work, of course, but also through careful study of aerial photos and maps, census data, and earlier studies of vernacular architecture. Of particular note is the PRIO project website which collects information on the displacement of Greek and Turkish Cypriots after the 1974 war. I’ve been deeply curious about the situation in the Chrysochou valley around the village of Polis in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The PRIO project website collects information no the villages of Polis, Chrysochou, Androlikou, Evretou, Meladeia, Melandra, Makounta, Myrimikoph, Gialia, Neo Chorio, Prodromi, Pelathousa, Ay. Isodoros, Tremythousa, and other predominantly Turkish-Cypriot settlements in the region.

Anyone who has spent any time in the Cypriot countryside knows that it is laced with abandoned villages. The reasons for the abandonment varied, but the intercommunal violence of the 1950s and the 1974 war represent major episodes of settlement reorganization which left numerous villages abandoned in the western part of the island. There were other opportunities for abandonment, of course, including in the Dhiarizos valley, earthquakes and dangers of landslides and slips. One of the more interesting observations offered by Villani is that the cause of abandonment not only impacts what was left at the site, but also subsequently post-abandonment formation processes. The removal of doors, windows, and roof tiles, for example, from a village abandoned because of the risk of landslips tends to accelerate the decay of the structures. Buildings abandoned as a result of the 1974 war tended to be more intact at the time of abandonment because their owners didn’t have the opportunity to come back and remove parts of the build that still had value. This ensured that many of these structures remained standing longer. 

Villani was also attentive to the materials used in the abandoned villages and how these impacted site formation. While it is widely known that mud brick will deteriorate if not maintained over a period of 50-70 years, the interplay of mud-brick, cinder blocks, cement roofs, and other building materials creates more complex processes. The tendency for heavy cement roofs which became common in mid-century Cyprus to collapse onto the floors of houses in ways that made them inaccessible (and therefore difficult to study) further impacts how we understand abandonment. Villani notes that the re-use of buildings by shepherds, for example. Shepherds tended to abandon the buildings used to house sheep or goats when they became filled with dung and other detritus. This suggests a strategy that either recognized an abundance of abandoned buildings or saw their opportunism as a short term strategy. 

Finally, it was particularly interesting to compare the PRIO data to the Kitchener maps from 1882 for the Chrysochou Valley. Over the last 10 years or so, I’ve been so immersed in the nitty gritty from the Princeton excavations that I’ve lost a bit of perspective on the larger region. I knew, of course, that many of the villages in the region were either Turkish Cypriot or had large Turkish-Cypriot populations and as a result were abandoned.