Agia Marina Skylloura is a Maronite community in the occupied part of the Lefkosia district. It lies 22 kilometres west of Lefkosia and 13 kilometres east of Morfou, at an elevation of 220 metres. Together with Kormakitis, Karpaseia and Asomatos it was one of the four Maronite villages of Cyprus in the twentieth century, and the only one of them in the Lefkosia district.¹ In the 1960 census it had 440 inhabitants, of whom none was Greek, 375 were Maronites and 65 Turks.

Name

The village takes its name from Saint Marina, to whom its church is dedicated. The qualifier “Skylloura”, from neighbouring Skylloura, distinguishes it from the other communities of the same name. The Jesuit Girolamo Dandini, who passed through Cyprus in 1596 as the pope’s envoy to the Maronites of Lebanon, writes “Santamarina” and the British Kitchener map “Ayia Marina”; the village is also recorded in the Ottoman survey of 1832/33.²

Founding and first records

Agia Marina has not been found in the fifteenth-century lists of villages: the “Santa Marina” of the Venetian list of royal villages published by the nineteenth-century French historian Louis de Mas Latrie belonged to the mountain villages of the bailiwick of Morfou, together with Xyliatos and Polystypos, and is a different village. The first known written record is Dandini’s. In 1596 he asked Italians, Greeks and Maronites about the Maronites of the island and recorded the nineteen villages where they lived, among them “Santamarina”, which the British editor of the text, C. D. Cobham, identifies with Agia Marina.³

Archaeological sites

In 1966 the Department of Antiquities carried out a rescue excavation of a tomb of the Classical Greek period at the site of Palioekklisia, about one kilometre east of the village. The tomb contained vessels, among them a lentoid flask 22.5 centimetres high and a jug with painted decoration that the publication describes as rare, and two iron tools, a chisel with a bone handle and a knife. It shows that the land of the village was already inhabited in the Classical Greek period.⁴

Turkish rule

During the years of Turkish rule the number of Maronites in Cyprus fell greatly. In 1686, according to a publication of the Press and Information Office on the Maronites, they lived in only eight villages, among them Agia Marina.⁵

In the property survey made by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Agia Marina is recorded as a mixed village, with 13 households holding property, Christian and Muslim. They had fields of cereals, a garden, five threshing floors, 134 olive trees and an olive press, and about 230 sheep and goats, cows and a few oxen.⁶

Churches and monasteries

The village church, which is Maronite, is dedicated to Saint Marina and stands on the eastern side of the old village centre.⁷

Near the village stands the monastery of the Prophet Elias. According to the Press and Information Office publication, the monastery was built in 1735 by two Maronite monks, Petros, a Cypriot, and Makarios, a Lebanese, and for centuries it was the spiritual centre of the Maronites of Cyprus.⁸ The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the monuments of Cyprus in the early twentieth century, found it small, with two or three Maronite monks, on a flat-topped hill with steep slopes that stands out from afar at the western edge of the Mesaoria.⁹ The church and monastery of the Prophet Elias are an Ancient Monument of the Department of Antiquities.

The village had two cemeteries, of which the newer had been in use since 1955.¹⁰ The Maronite cemetery lies about 200 metres east of the church.¹¹

Economy and society

The inhabitants lived mainly from farming and stock-raising.¹² According to the Press and Information Office publication, in 1928 Agia Marina, together with Kormakitis, founded one of the first co-operative credit societies in Cyprus; in 1945 the New Co-operative Credit Society of Agia Marina was founded and in 1970 the Co-operative Grocery. In 1967 the young people of the village founded the sports club “Kedros Agias Marinas Skylloura”.¹³

Education

The village’s mixed elementary school operated from 1892 to 1974.¹⁴ In the school year 1973–74 it had 73 pupils and 3 teachers.

Population

In 1946 the village had 323 inhabitants, of whom 6 were Orthodox, 37 Muslims and 280 of another religion, the village’s Maronites (the 1946 census recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 440 inhabitants, 375 Maronites and 65 Turks, and in 1973 414 inhabitants, none of them Turks.

The Turkish invasion of 1974

During the Turkish invasion of 1974 Agia Marina was captured by the Turkish army. The village and the monastery of the Prophet Elias were bombed by the Turkish air force, and the monastery was seriously damaged during the second phase of the invasion.¹⁵ Unlike the other three Maronite villages, no inhabitant remained enclaved in Agia Marina: its whole population was subjected to ethnic cleansing, and today nobody lives there.¹⁶

One inhabitant of Agia Marina, a civilian, was recorded as missing; he was arrested in the village itself, and his remains have been located and identified.

The occupation authorities illegally turned the village into a Turkish army camp. The Turkish army also used the grounds of the monastery of the Prophet Elias. Since 2006 a pilgrimage has been held at the monastery every year, on the feast of the Prophet Elias.¹⁷ The church of Agia Marina and the cemetery lie inside the prohibited military zone, and Cyprus Religious Heritage was not able to visit them.¹⁸