The Saint George church in the Kyrenia district village of Vouno collapsed on Saturday night, prompting the village’s Turkish Cypriot mukhtar Durmus Asandir on Tuesday to take aim at the Turkish Cypriot authorities for allowing the building to fall into disrepair.

“I became Vouno mukhtar in 2010 and a few years later, we noticed that the church’s ceiling was leaking water and that there were cracks in the building. We removed the children who were playing in the area at the time and made a verbal application to the [north’s] antiquities department,” he told newspaper Yeni Duzen.

He added that after making the request, officials from the north’s antiquities department had visited the site and looked at it, but that “there was no other development, and the issue was shelved.

“Six or seven years ago, Greek Cypriots visited the village and the church and said they wanted maintenance to be done. They wanted to undertake the repairs with their own means. We applied to the antiquities department again and said, ‘this building is going to collapse, let us repair it with our own means’,” he said.

The response he says he received at the time was, ‘you cannot even hammer a nail, mukhtar’.

“It is clear what happened at this stage. Today, the antiquities department is primarily responsible for the collapse of this church. If precautions had been taken in time, this church would not have collapsed. A historical place has collapsed due to a lack of maintenance,” he added.

He expressed relief that the building collapsed during the night and that no one was injured when it did so.

“People living in the area experienced great panic. We came and could only look on. Thankfully, no one was hurt,” he said.

Vouno was inhabited by Greek Cypriots and Maronites until 1974, with the Saint George church one of two Greek orthodox churches in the village. The village’s Maronite church is called the Saint Romanos.

Since 1974, the village has been primarily inhabited by Turkish Cypriots from the Larnaca district village of Tochni.