Acheritou is a large Greek community in the occupied part of the Ammochostos district. It lies 7 kilometres south-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 40 metres, in the geographical region of the Mesaoria. To the north-east of the village spreads the Acheritou reservoir, the large irrigation work built around 1899, and on its land, to the north, lie the ruins of the medieval village of Trapeza. In the 1960 census it had 1,036 inhabitants, of whom 1,035 were Greeks.

Name

The origin of the name is not known. On old maps the village is marked as “Achiroito”,¹ and the Italian traveller Giovanni Mariti, who lived in Cyprus in the 1760s, writes it “Acerito”.² In the place-names of the neighbouring villages the name is declined “tis Acheritous”, as in the “Strata tis Acheritous”, that is, the road to Acheritou, at Kalopsida and Liopetri.³

Founding and first records

Acheritou does not appear in the lists of fiefs and royal villages of Frankish and Venetian rule. Its name is, however, marked on old maps, as the British architect George Jeffery, curator of the ancient monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, observes.⁴ The first description of the village is by Mariti, who stayed there for a few days in the 1760s.⁵

On the land of Acheritou, about three and a half kilometres north of the village, the official gazetteer of Cyprus records the place-name “Trapeza” and, near it, the Ancient Monument of Chrysopolitissa.⁶ There stood the medieval village of Trapeza, which has its own history in the sources of Frankish and Venetian rule. In the 1760s Mariti found it with few inhabitants, little more than a refuge for shepherds and their flocks, among the ruins of a large settlement; Jeffery describes it as ruined.⁷

Archaeological sites

The land of Acheritou was inhabited from pre-Greek times. In a surface survey of the Department of Antiquities, the British archaeologist Hector Catling recorded at two sites of the village, near Kalopsida, settlements and cemeteries of the Early Bronze Age. He published them in 1962, in his study of the distribution of Bronze Age settlements in Cyprus.⁸

Frankish and Venetian rule

Trapeza, on the land of Acheritou, was a village of the royal domain in the years of Frankish rule. In August 1425, when the fleet of the Sultan of Egypt landed an army near Ammochostos, the Mamluks burned Trapeza and Kalopsida, as the 15th-century Cypriot chronicler Leontios Machairas writes.⁹

In February 1469 King James II ordered 400 bezants to be given to the captain of Sivouri, Philippos Synglitikos, for the repair and building of the royal village of Trapeza. Shortly after Cyprus passed to the Venetians, Trapeza is recorded among the five royal villages of the bailiwick of Sotira, the administrative district to which it belonged, together with Sotira, Paralimni, Liopetri and Strovilia. Both documents were published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie.¹⁰

Turkish rule

In the 1760s Mariti found Acheritou, on a small rise, densely inhabited and well cultivated. It was the estate of Andronikos Karydis, honorary interpreter of Maria Theresa, Queen of Hungary. Near his residence there was a small chapel of Agia Marina, simply built but adorned with old icons of saints, which Karydis had bought from houses in Ammochostos. During the days he stayed in the village, Mariti saw the great destruction the locusts did to the crops.¹¹

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Acheritou is a village with a mixed population, with 23 households holding property. They held mainly cotton fields and wheat fields, more than 1,200 animals, most of them sheep and goats, and oxen. Among the property holders a priest is also recorded.¹²

British rule

Around 1899 the government of Cyprus built, mainly to the north-east of the village, large irrigation works, with a dam that formed the Acheritou reservoir. They were designed and carried out by the engineer Medlicott, of the irrigation department of India. When the dam was being built, the remains of an older dam were found on the same spot. The English writer H. Rider Haggard, who saw them, considered them Roman, while Medlicott considered them Venetian.¹³

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox parish church of the village, in the south-western part of the old centre, is dedicated to the Ascension of Christ and dates from the 19th or the 20th century. Next to it stands the chapel of Agia Marina, of 1758, which is an Ancient Monument. Jeffery mentions it in 1918 as the rebuilt church of the village.¹⁴

At Trapeza, north of the village, stands the chapel of Panagia Chrysopolitissa, known as Panagia Trapeza, an Ancient Monument. It was built in the 14th century and extended on all sides in 1565. Mariti saw two churches at Trapeza, one of them large, adorned with marble and with a portico on marble columns. Jeffery describes the better preserved one as three-aisled, with vaults and domes, in which elements of medieval Greek and Gothic architecture are combined, as in the works of the local master builders of the 15th and 16th centuries.¹⁵

South of the village stands the small country chapel of Agios Georgios, of the 13th century, which is also an Ancient Monument. On the land of Acheritou there was also the country chapel of Agia Eirini. The village also has a Greek Orthodox cemetery.

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew mainly cereals, fodder crops, citrus fruit and potatoes. Stock-breeding was well developed: in 1973 more than 5,000 sheep were raised in the village, more than in almost any other village of the district. Many inhabitants also worked in nearby Ammochostos, and this, according to the same encyclopaedia, was the main reason the population of the village grew in the last decades before the invasion.¹⁶

Population

Acheritou grew steadily in the 20th century. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Acheritou had 283 inhabitants in 1881, 338 in 1891, 505 in 1901, 522 in 1911 and 538 in 1921.¹⁷ In 1931 it had 696 inhabitants, all of them Christians, and in 1946 947, of whom 938 were Orthodox, 8 Muslims and one of another religion (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,036 inhabitants, 1,035 Greeks and one Armenian, and in 1973 1,267 Greeks. In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of Acheritou had 227 pupils and seven teachers.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 483 inhabitants of Acheritou signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 55 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Acheritou was captured by the Turkish army and its Greek population was subjected to ethnic cleansing. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of its inhabitants.

Four inhabitants of Acheritou, all of them soldiers, were recorded as missing. They were lost outside the village: at Flamoudi, in the area of Aspri Moutti on the Pentadaktylos, in the area of Mia Milia and in the area of Lapithos. The remains of two of them have been located and identified; the other two are still missing. On the land of Acheritou two civilians were killed in 1974, at the locality Matsikoridies and in the area of the village.

The occupation authorities illegally converted the church of the Ascension into a mosque. Its crosses were removed and almost all the furnishings of an Orthodox church were taken out of its interior; since 2014–15, when a new mosque was built, it has been abandoned. According to Cyprus Religious Heritage, the chapel of Panagia Trapeza was restored in 2022.¹⁸