Agyia is a Turkish community in the occupied part of the Lefkosia district. It lies 19 kilometres east of Lefkosia, at an elevation of 90 metres, in the Mesaoria plain, and was the easternmost village of the district.¹ In the 1960 census it had 418 inhabitants, all of them Turks.

Name

The Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia writes the name “Agia”.² The British architect George Jeffery, who recorded the historic monuments of Cyprus at the beginning of the 20th century, notes that the name of the village, “Ayias”, already appears on the old maps, and counts it among the many Moslem villages of Cyprus with a Christian name.³ On the land of the village the official gazetteer of place names of Cyprus (Gazetteer) records, among others, the hill Oros tis Agyias and the Merikopotamos stream.⁴

Turkish rule

In the land survey carried out by the Ottoman administration in 1832/33, which recorded only those who held property, Agyia belonged to the district of Mesaoria and is listed as a Muslim village, with 18 households holding property. Its land was mostly fallow fields, with a few gardens watered by waterwheels and one cotton field. Only one tree is recorded, an olive. The owners had almost 580 sheep and a few oxen and cows.⁵

Economy and society

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, before 1974 only cereals were grown on the land of the village, which had no irrigated land. Stock-breeding had developed early, as the 1832/33 survey also shows: in 1973 the village had 4,545 sheep and goats, one of the largest numbers for a single village in the whole of Cyprus.⁶ Jeffery noted an immense irrigation tank in the village.⁷

Population

According to the Great Cyprian Encyclopaedia, the village had 209 inhabitants in 1881, 222 in 1891, 253 in 1901, 308 in 1911 and 329 in 1921.⁸ In 1931 Agyia had 295 inhabitants, all of them Muslims, and in 1946 414, of whom one was Orthodox and 413 Muslims (the 1931 and 1946 censuses recorded only religion). In 1960 it had 418 inhabitants, all of them Turks, and in 1973 around 550 Turks (estimate).