This months village is Filousa Chrysohous and is 11km from Polis on the road through Steni and Peristerona.

It is the last village on the edge of the Paphos district and is located ½ km from the forest of Stavros Tis Psokas. There we met Mr Demitris Tsadiotis. Demitris has been the Muktar of the village for the last 3 years. Demitris is 49 years old and was born and grew up in Filousa. Filousa is one of the oldest villages in the area.

Ancient tombs and caves have been discovered, that show people have been living there since the ancient times. From the books of the Muktar, in 1965 the population of the village was 150. Before then there were as many as 300 people.

The population of the village today is 30, the youngest Mr Chrystakis Agathangelous who is 34 is a Deacon. The oldest is 93 and the average age of he village is 85. There are 80 houses in Filousa and there are also 3 ex pat families that live in the village.

Listening to the stories from the villagers, we found there is a Turkish Cypriot cemetery in the village which shows that some of the citizens of the village used to be Turkish Cypriot in the very old days. But until 1974, before the Turkish invention there weren’t any.

Around the outskirts of Filousa there are 8 Turkish Cypriot villages. The office of the Muktar has been donated for him to use for 5 years. The village school closed some years ago as there were no young children to attend. When it was open, there was only one teacher.

There are plans to turn the school into a museum. Even though people had very little money, what they did have went towards their childrens education, they sent them to schools where they could study to become teachers and professors. Unfortunately they never returned to the village. In the village square, there are some ruins where you can see an old olive press, a mill for crushing wheat and a fountain that supplied water from the mountains where the villagers could collect water for their homes and animals in the old days, now this water is going for watering the fields.

In the old days the village had an ironsmith, a blacksmith, a coppersmith, a barber, a shoemaker and a carpenter who specialised in makings tools and equipment for farming. Today there are only farmers and Sheppards. There are 2 churches in the village, the largest and oldest church belongs to St George and was destroyed during an earthquake. It was restored with the help of donations but unfortunately traditional materials were not used, only the bell tower has the original stonework. The second church belongs to St Vinkhianos and has been built in the traditional style.

Donations were from the Muktar and the help from priest, Neophetos Efstathiou.

Your first impression when you enter the village is of a building site as there is a lot of work going on but eventually the aim is to have a traditional village. You wont find any modern buildings in Filousa, the Muktar has very strong views about the character of the village. In the future the plan is to lay all the roads with traditional stone and the government have already agreed to plans to renovate the village square.

The road into the village is currently very narrow and needs repairing but plans are in place to widen and repair the road which has taken many years and a lot of hard work to get the plans agreed. Because the population of the village is so small, the funding for the renovation work has come from the government.

There were two heroes from the village, Mr Andreas Mazarakis who went missing during the 1974 Turkish invasion whose bones were discovered in a tomb and later identified using DNA and Demitris’ father, Mr George Chrystou Tsatiotis was one of the EOKA fighters.