Abandonment: Fikardou

This short documentary in Greek, produced by the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus, examines whether the mountain village of Fikardou in the Troodos range can be considered abandoned and how heritage protection and television fame have shaped its modern history.

Situated at an altitude of 892 metres at the foot of Mount Koutsouventis, Fikardou appears to have been settled in the 13th century by four or five families and took its name from Thomas de Fikardou, chancellor to James II, who held it as a family fief. The documentary traces the village's demographics: always a small settlement, it had 60 inhabitants in 1881, 120 in 1946, and 13 residents by 1982 amid the wider rural abandonment in Cyprus in the decade after 1974. Today it has no permanent residents in practice, though houses are kept for holidays.

In 1978 the Department of Antiquities declared the entire village an Ancient Monument and its surroundings a Controlled Area, recognising that Fikardou preserved its late-19th-century architectural character almost intact and could not be saved merely by expropriating and repairing a pair of houses for museum use. Interviewees recall the initial suspicion of house owners, who feared expropriation and objected to building restrictions, and how attitudes shifted once repairs began and owners saw that their houses remained theirs while receiving grants of up to 100,000 euros for approved conservation work.

The second half of the film examines the two years in which the television series Aigia Fuxia, broadcast by Antenna, was filmed in Fikardou. The show drew thousands of visitors every week and two-kilometre queues of parked cars, bringing visitors from as far as Australia as well as physical damage and cleaning costs to the village, while making it easier for people from the village living away to return. The documentary closes with reflections from residents, younger descendants and a village association representative on the lack of a twenty-year plan and the hope of sustaining Fikardou as a living cultural village rather than a ghost village.