Achna is a large Greek community in the occupied part of the Ammochostos district. It lies 18 kilometres south-west of Ammochostos, at an elevation of 50 metres, in the geographical region of the Kokkinochoria. It is built at the edge of a fertile, well-watered valley, in a dry plain, roughly halfway along the straight line from Larnaka to ancient Salamis, and the old road from Pyla to Ammochostos passed beside it.¹ In the 1960 census it had 1,833 inhabitants, of whom 1,832 were Greeks.

Name

In a Venetian list of the late 15th century the village is written “Casal Athna”, and in the years of British rule the British wrote it “Athna” or “Akhna”. The official gazetteer of Cyprus writes “Achna”.²

Founding and first records

The first written mention of Achna is in a Venetian statistical memorandum of the late 15th century, published by the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie (see Frankish and Venetian rule).³

The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus in the early 20th century, noted in 1918 that Achna was built on a new site, and that the ruins of the older village lay about a mile further south. In 1882, at any rate, the village already stood on its present site, next to the ancient sanctuary (see Archaeological sites).⁴ To the south-east, on the land of Achna, the Gazetteer also records the place-name “Palion Prastion”.⁵

Archaeological sites

In the spring of 1882 the inhabitants of Achna were digging, on behalf of the government, square pits along the valley, of the kind that were dug to destroy the swarms of locusts. At one spot, about 50 metres from the last houses of the village, they found terracotta statues piled up “like sardines in a box”. The village children played with them, and some of the best were sold to a barber in Larnaka. From that sale the German archaeologist Max Ohnefalsch-Richter learned of the site, and in September and October 1882 he excavated it on behalf of the British Museum.⁶

It was an open-air sanctuary of a goddess, without a temple: a low dry-stone enclosure with an entrance, an earthen altar and statue bases. Inside it were found more than a thousand offerings of clay and limestone, from small figurines to colossal statues at least three and a half metres tall, all but one of them female and most of them painted. The women hold their breasts, a flower or a bird; other figures play the lyre or the tambourine. The first offerings belong to the archaic ancient Greek period, most probably not before the 6th century BC, and the worship continued into Roman times. Ohnefalsch-Richter attributed the sanctuary to Artemis-Cybele, from the figures holding a deer, but no dedication from the enclosure names the goddess. Most of the finds are in the British Museum; others are in the Louvre and the Cyprus Museum. The sanctuary was never excavated again, and its exact location is not marked today.⁷

The same year five more places of worship with similar offerings were found near the village, among them a second sanctuary further east in the valley of Achna and one towards Avgorou, and a cemetery on the south side of the village was investigated. At the locality Farangas, to the north-east towards Acheritou, where the Gazetteer records the “Argaki tou Farangou”, a workman of the Cesnolas had dug another enclosure with rich finds; its exact location is not known.⁸

Antiquity

Achna most probably lay within the territory of the Greek kingdom of Salamis. The French archaeologist Sabine Fourrier assigns the archaic figurines of the sanctuary to a group of workshops of Salamis, while other scholars see a closer connection with Kition. Typical figurines of Achna travelled, most probably by way of Salamis, to many parts of the eastern Mediterranean.⁹

In the classical Greek period figures in a purely Greek style appear in the sanctuary, of limestone and clay, with a deer, a dog or a torch. Built into the wall of a more recent house in Achna, a Greek dedication to Aphrodite Golgia, the goddess of Golgoi, was found, dated to the 4th century BC. In the Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) and the Roman periods too the faithful went on leaving offerings, and the inscriptions of those times that survive from Achna are written in Greek.¹⁰

Frankish and Venetian rule

Achna was a royal village, that is, it belonged directly to the state and not to a feudal lord. In the Venetian memorandum published by Mas Latrie, “Casal Athna” is one of the six royal villages of the bailiwick of Sigouri, the administrative district centred on the castle of Sigouri in the Mesaoria, together with “Casal Sivori” and “Casal Prastio”.¹¹

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Achna is recorded as a Christian village, with 31 households holding property. The holdings were mainly fields, among them 24 small cotton fields, while no trees at all are recorded. The inhabitants had about 700 sheep and goats, 15 pairs of oxen, cows, two sheepfolds and beehives.¹²

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village, in the southern part of the settlement, is dedicated to Saint Marina. The 2009 list of occupied churches of the Church of Cyprus dates it to the 18th century. The new cemetery, just outside the village to the east, opened in 1936.¹³

The 2009 list also mentions the chapels of Agios Georgios ton Alonion, Agios Vasileios, Agia Varvara, Agios Andronikos, Agios Vlasios and Agia Theora.

Economy and society

In the 19th century, writes Mas Latrie, the great grain fair of the Mesaoria was held near the ruined church of Achna on 6 October, the feast of Saint Kendeas.¹⁴

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, although rainfall in the area is low, the groundwater of the Kokkinochoria allowed the inhabitants to turn early to irrigated crops. Before 1974 they grew mainly potatoes, citrus fruit, vegetables, fodder crops and cereals, and almost half the land of the village was irrigated. In the 1960s one large and three small groundwater recharge works were built at Achna; the Gazetteer records the Achna dam. Stock-breeding was also well developed: in 1973 the village had 6,396 sheep, 1,620 goats and 78 cows, and was fourth in sheep in the whole Ammochostos district.¹⁵

Education

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Achna already had a community school before British rule.¹⁶ In the school year 1973–74 the village had two Greek elementary schools: the First with 184 pupils and six teachers, and the Second with 91 pupils and three teachers.

Population

The population of Achna grew quickly. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, Achna had 407 inhabitants in 1881, 471 in 1891, 564 in 1901, 742 in 1911 and 956 in 1921.¹⁷ In 1931 it had 1,238 inhabitants, 1,235 Christians and 3 Muslims, and in 1946 1,986, all of them Orthodox (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 1,833 inhabitants, of whom 1,832 were Greeks, and in 1973 1,979 Greeks.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 1,076 inhabitants of Achna signed. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 92 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The EOKA fighter Giasoumis Chatzitheodosiou came from Achna.¹⁸ Two fighters from other villages were also active in the village: Fotis Pittas from Frenaros, who taught at the elementary school of Achna, and Andreas Karyos from Avgorou, whose group attacked the police station of Achna.¹⁹

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Achna was captured by the Turkish army. According to a witness who testified before the European Commission of Human Rights, only three persons then remained in the village.²⁰ The inhabitants took refuge on the land of the village that lies within the British base of Dekeleia, where most of them settled at Dasaki Achnas.²¹ According to the government of Cyprus, as recorded by the Commission, the last inhabitants of Achna were expelled at the end of June 1975.²² Thus the Greek population of the village was subjected to ethnic cleansing. Since then the Turkish occupation forces and the illegal occupation authority prevent the return of its inhabitants.

Achna remained uninhabited, within a military zone. According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the Turkish army uses only a few buildings, while the village was looted, even the doors and windows were removed, and today it is deserted and half-ruined. The same encyclopaedia records that on 19 March 1989 women from free Cyprus, among them many women of Achna, marched into Achna and, despite the reaction of the Turkish soldiers, stayed there for hours and chanted in the looted church of Agia Marina.²³

The Commission also recorded the testimony of a doctor about two civilians who were arrested at Achna when they went to the village to fetch belongings from their houses. Both were beaten and tortured so severely that one lost his toes to gangrene and the other needed his legs amputated.²⁴

Eight inhabitants of Achna, 2 civilians and 6 soldiers, were recorded as missing. The two civilians were arrested in the village; one was lost there and the other at the Turkish hospital in Lefkosia. The soldiers were lost in the Sygchari–Belapais area (2), at Akanthou, in the Lapithos–Karavas area, in the Trachonas area and in the Agios Dimitrios area of Kaimakli. The remains of 3 have been located and identified; the other 5 are still missing. One more inhabitant of the village, a soldier, was killed in the area of Athalassa. On the land of Achna one person killed is recorded, a civilian from neighbouring Makrasyka, who was shot in the village and died in the hospital at Dekeleia.

The church of Agia Marina lies within the military zone and appears to be used illegally by the Turkish army as a guard post. In the cemetery parts of the enclosure wall have been knocked down.²⁵