Overview

A few years after the Greek revolution against the Turks in 1821, Dositheos was the Church Steward in the Monastery of The Holy Cross in Omodos. A clergyman with a brave heart and many virtues, he cleverly befriended Kioutsouk Mehmet, then governor of Cyprus, to whom he often gave gifts from the treasury of the Holy Cross, aiming to achieve some service for his fellow-villagers. Such services he often managed to achieve and so the inhabitants of the entire region loved him very much and considered him as their saviour and their great patron. Things went normally until the big moment arrived for the revolution of the Greeks against the Ottoman Empire. Cyprus was also to pay dearly for that uprising of the Greek Nation. On that fateful day of the 9 th of July 1821, the Archbishop Kyprianos was hanged and the “Despots” (high ranking priests) were slaughtered. Among the clergymen that fell victims to the Turkish atrocity of those times was also the Church Steward of the Holy Cross Monastery in Omodos, Dositheos, who was an old man by then. Among other events related to the name of Dositheos is the first bell that was ever heard in Cyprus from the steeple of the Holy Cross Monastery of Omodos in 1812, because the Turks were not annoyed by its sound. Dositheos is also the real maker of today’s building in the Monastery. Today’s inhabitants of Omodos, honouring the holy remembrance of the legendary Dositheos, have set up his bust next to the monastery’s entrance, above which the following is recorded: “DOSITHEOS FROM OMODOS, CHURCH STEWARD OF THE HOLY CROSS’S MONASTERY, SLAUGHTERED ON THE 12TH OF JULY 1821.”