Agia Eirini is a mixed community in the occupied part of the Keryneia district. It lies 33 kilometres west of Keryneia, at an elevation of 60 metres, two kilometres from the north-west coast, and is surrounded by forests. It is known for the ancient sanctuary excavated in 1929 by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, and for the ancient town at the locality Paliokastron, on the coast. In the 1960 census it had 471 inhabitants, of whom 166 were Greeks and 305 Turks.

Name

The village took its name from Saint Eirini, to whom its church is dedicated. On Kitchener’s British map of Cyprus, from the first years of British rule, the name is written “Ayia Irini”.

Founding and first records

In the lists of villages of Frankish and Venetian rule preserved by the 16th-century Cypriot chronicler Florio Bustron and the 19th-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie, Agia Eirini was not found. Its first certain written mention is in the property survey of 1832/33.

The land of the village, however, has been inhabited since very early times. At the locality Paliokastron, about two kilometres west of the village, on the coast, a pre-Greek settlement was succeeded by an ancient Greek town, which lived on into the Roman period, while the ancient sanctuary lies near the present village. The official gazetteer of Cyprus records on the land of the village the localities Paliokastron, Alonia, Charangas and Mnimata.¹

Archaeological sites

In November 1929 a priest, Papa-Prokopios, brought to Lefkosia the head of a terracotta statue he had found in his field. That same winter the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, under the archaeologist Erik Sjöqvist, excavated an open-air sanctuary. Around a limestone altar stood, in a semicircle, almost 2,000 terracotta statues and figurines, mainly male figures, with the smaller ones closest to the altar. Among them were chariots, bulls and composite figures, such as centaurs, and two small human figures wearing bull masks, which were interpreted as priests. The head of the Expedition, the Swedish archaeologist Einar Gjerstad, who published the sanctuary in 1935, dated the first traces of worship to around 1200 BC, at the end of the Bronze Age. More recent studies show that the sanctuary was in use from the 8th century BC and reached its greatest flourishing in the 8th and 7th centuries BC. A fertility deity was most probably worshipped there. The publication made the sanctuary a point of reference for the study of Cypriot terracotta figurines. The offerings were divided between the Cyprus Museum and Sweden; the roughly 1,000 that went to Sweden are now displayed in the Museum of Mediterranean Antiquities in Stockholm.² The sanctuary lies inland, near the village.³

At the locality Paliokastron, the Archaeological Survey of the Department of Antiquities identified in 1955 an important town of the classical Greek period.⁴ In 1961, when illicit diggers were plundering its cemetery, the Department cleared rock-cut tombs of the archaic and classical Greek periods. Besides Cypriot pottery, they contained vessels from Ionia and Samaria, an Attic skyphos and a jug with an incised Phoenician inscription. These vessels show contacts with the Greek cities of Ionia and the Aegean and with the East.⁵

From 1970 to 1973 an Italian mission of the Institute of Mycenaean and Aegean-Anatolian Studies of Rome excavated at Paliokastron. In the coastal cemetery, rock-cut chamber tombs of the pre-Greek and the archaic Greek periods came to light, most of them already looted. In one of the first tombs, weights, balance pans and metalworking tools were found, evidence of trade and metalworking as early as at any other coastal settlement of Cyprus. A chamber at the south-west corner of the wall held 31 burials and about 400 objects, among them cups that are most probably Cretan and 26 Syrian vessels. In one of the archaic tombs a Euboean skyphos was found. The mission also excavated a large part of the town, with houses with baths and workshops, public baths, three parallel streets and a thick wall with square towers. About a hundred metres south of the village, at the locality Charangas, it excavated poor tombs of the geometric ancient Greek period, with plain pottery that finds parallels at Lapithos. A trench of 1973 on the hill of Paliokastron showed continuous habitation from the first half of the second millennium BC to the Ptolemaic Greek (“Hellenistic”) period. The research was interrupted in 1974 by the Turkish invasion.⁶

The site of the ancient town at Paliokastron is an Ancient Monument. The site of the sanctuary now lies within a Turkish military zone, where, according to the archaeologist Giorgos Bourogiannis, archaeological research is impossible and the site is at risk of looting.⁷

Antiquity

Paliokastron was already a coastal settlement in the pre-Greek period, with contacts with the Aegean, Crete and Syria. In the ancient Greek period the town and the sanctuary near the present village flourished side by side. The plan of the town, with its parallel streets, goes back, according to the excavators, to the end of the classical Greek period. The town lived on in the Ptolemaic Greek and the Roman periods, with multi-storey houses, wells and small squares, until it was abandoned after the 2nd century AD.⁸

The ancient name of the town is not known. The Cypriot archaeologist Kyriakos Nikolaou proposed, with reservation, that it be identified with Melabron, which an anonymous ancient Greek sailing guide of the Mediterranean mentions as a summer anchorage 50 stadia from Cape Krommyon, that is, Kormakitis.⁹

Turkish rule

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Agia Eirini is recorded as a mixed village, with 18 households holding property. The largest part of their property was their animals: more than 1,600 goats and a few sheep. Most of the fields were planted with madder, the plant from whose root a red dye was obtained, and quite a few were abandoned. There were also olive trees, a few mulberry trees and beehives.¹⁰

Churches and monasteries

The Greek Orthodox church of the village, dedicated to Saint Eirini, dates from 1830 and is an Ancient Monument. It stands at the western edge of the village centre, and restoration work was carried out on it in 1960. The Greek Orthodox cemetery lay half a kilometre south-west of the village.¹¹

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 the inhabitants grew citrus fruit, cereals, fruit trees, carob trees, olives and fodder crops. Stock-breeding remained, as in the survey of 1832/33, the most developed occupation: in 1973, 94 stock-breeders had more than 4,300 goats and 1,200 sheep. Around the village spread the forests of Kormakitis, Agia Eirini and Diorios, and the old sand dunes of the coast were contained by tree-planting.¹² The Second Co-operative Credit Society of Agia Eirini operated in the village.

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 162 inhabitants in 1881, 165 in 1891, 156 in 1901, 178 in 1911 and 188 in 1921.¹³ In 1931 Agia Eirini had 284 inhabitants, 133 Christians and 151 Muslims, and in 1946 368, of whom 146 were Orthodox and 222 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 471 inhabitants, 166 Greeks and 305 Turks, and in 1973 126 Greeks and about 550 Turks (estimate). In the school year 1973–74 the Greek elementary school of the village had 18 pupils and one teacher.

National struggles

In the Enosis plebiscite of 1950, 86 inhabitants signed, practically all the adult Greek inhabitants. The Register of EOKA Fighters lists 7 Greek inhabitants of the village who took part in or supported the Struggle.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

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

Three inhabitants of the village, all of them civilians, were lost in the village itself and were recorded as missing; their remains have not been located to this day. One more person killed in 1974, also a civilian, is recorded in the village.

The church of Agia Eirini was desecrated and looted. The bell and the cross of the bell tower were removed, all the furnishings of the church have been taken away, and the walls and the bell tower are deteriorating.¹⁴